Patricia Petibon is, for my money, the best soprano soloist the work's ever had on disc, while Christian Gerhaher is gloriously robust and fulsome and only a shade less commanding than Fischer-Dieskau -- but simply because Daniel Harding's interpretation is so radically different from the others . . . Harding, through his paring down of the orchestral textures to the bare bones, seems almost to be getting into the sound-world of the jazz ensemble, a collection of individual instrumentalists all doing their own thing around a very basic musical pattern; and much of Orff's writing is just about as basic as you can get. For me, it is this quality in this new recording that makes it stand out from the crowd.

Record Review /
Marc Rochester,
International Record Review (London) / 01. October 2010

The soloists give good accounts of themselves, Petibon achieving a nicely judged emotional progression from innocence in "Amor volat undique" to ecstasy in "Dulcissime" . . . Gerhaher is superb as the Abbas Cucaiensis . . . a definite front-runner and strongly recommended.

Record Review /
Guy Rickards,
Gramophone (London) / 01. November 2010

. . . a notably tight and disciplined performance . . . I like the way that Harding gets precision in the difficult choral staccato rhythms without being irritatingly punctilious. Impressive, too, is the rapt account of "Veris leta facies" as spring awakens, a draft of melancholy wafting through the forest. Christian Gerhaher is quality casting in the baritone solos . . . The choir is excellent throughout . . . The dances in "Uf dem anger" are attractively springy and light-textured, with delightfully fresh-toned . . . singing from the women's voices. Harding secures fine orchestral playing too ¿ the snap and thrum of plucked strings in "Swaz hie gat umbe" is crisply projected.

Orff’s Carmina Burana is one of the most widely performed works of the 20th century. Do you have any explanation for its incredible success?

There’s certainly something mysterious about it, but I think it may have to do with the ritual character of the piece and with its primeval qualities, even if these qualities are created by what are arguably artificial means. I also think that its success has something to do with its monumen-tality and overtly ritualistic character. I think there are obvious parallels with early Stravinsky. There is an obvious relationship between the sound world of Carmina Burana and Stravinsky’s Les Noces, and in regard to its content, the rather brutal depiction of the arrival of spring for example, with The Rite of Spring. Of course, Stravinsky’s Rite is a far more complex and revolutionary work, but both Orff and Stravinsky unleash powerful rhythmic forces, and these appeal to the listener on what may be an instinctive level. The popularity may have a lot to do with Carmina being simply enormous fun to play and to sing. It is hugely popular with amateur choirs and orchestras everywhere and is a very rewarding piece to perform in this context.

The baritone Christian Gerhaher, who is appearing in this recording with you, has described Carmina Burana as “magisterially meretricious”. Is it a manipulative work?

Yes, the music is undeniably manipulative. Paradoxically I find myself also thinking of it as honest. By that I mean that if you listen very carefully you can grasp almost all of it at an initial hearing. One of the most common observations about great art is that the more one gets to know it, the more one discovers. We all know the feeling of hearing or studying a piece we have known for years and suddenly hearing it in a new way or noticing something, now seemingly obvious, that we had never noticed before. Carmina is, at times, a very subtle piece and must be played with great care and attention. Like anything of stature it is very hard to perform it well and to do justice to it, but there is a sense in which it presents itself to us on first hearing. I certainly don’t mean this in a negative sense. The old argument over whether this is really great music gets us nowhere, for the piece never claims to be anything other than what it is.

To return to the manipulative . . .

I think the musical language of the piece is highly manipulative, not to mention the text. What Orff has done is to combine the medieval and the modern in an artificial musical language. The treatment of the orchestra and the whole approach to rhythm clearly point to the early 20th century; a huge part of the melody, harmony (or lack of it) and development (or lack of it) of the musical material points much further back. I think most people have a great weakness for things that appear to stretch far back into the past, a weakness for ritual, often without wondering from where the ritual springs. It lends authority. Orff combines this assumed authority with a modern musical language that 20th-century listeners could understand much more easily than the original music of the Middle Ages. The effect is equally strong today and discussing it does nothing to diminish the power that this music has.

So it is a typically modern attempt to escape from the modern age and to return to an earlier period . . .

Yes, and at the same time he makes the old easier to grasp, he gives it an attractive packaging. I don’t think you can object to that. In many respects the piece is more complicated than it sounds, above all on the level of rhythm. Orff follows the text in an apparently very natural way, which is why even fairly tricky types of beat are so memorable. The harmonic writing and the form, conversely, are deliberately kept very simple. There is no thematic development, the music creates its effect simply through the power of repetition.

This presumably represents a particular challenge for the performers – especially when the text deals with two completely different things, while the music remains exactly the same.

That’s true, but this problem exists with every strophic setting of a text. Every musician deals with it differently. Christian [Gerhaher] is meticulous about shading the repetitions to express the changing message of the text in the different strophes, even though the notes themselves remain the same.

And you?

In many places I have tried to produce different tone colours depending on what the text is all about. On the other hand, one has to be careful not to undermine the power that comes from the repetition. After all, Orff had good reason for writing it in the way he did.

The work’s subtitle is “Stage Pictures”, and Orff himself spoke of a “scenic cantata”. How much theatre is there in this piece?

I have never seen a stage performance of the piece. But it would be fascinating to know exactly how Orff imagined the work on stage. There are moments when the music triggers powerful vis-ual impressions – the dying swan, for example, has something incredibly visual about it. But at the same time there are also relatively abstract sections. Orff’s music is so evocative that you really don’t need a stage performance: the images arise before our inner eye simply by dint of our hearing them.